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June 8, 2007 Speak Out at Energy Forum Town Meeting Planned to be Held in Cheyenne Wednesday, June 13th, 2007 In order to advance a conversation on alternative energy, BCA is partnering with ConocoPhillips in a forum designed to present the good, the bad, and the ugly of alternative energy solutions. The meeting will cover energy options for the future, from alternative renewable fuels to traditional sources like oil and gas. The town hall meeting in Cheyenne, Wyoming, will be held to discuss energy solutions that are reliable, available and environmentally friendly, and they want to hear from you. BCA has long labored to reform the excesses of the oil and gas industry, which has wreaked havoc on wildlife populations and treasured landscapes across much of Wyoming. Renewable and alternative energy projects are just getting started, and now is the time for careful advanced planning to avoid major problems and impacts like those caused by oil and gas today, rather than waiting for a crisis. Key considerations include protecting special places from all types of industrial impacts, maintaining key wildlife habitats in top condition, preventing pollution that accelerates global warming, and doing energy projects in the right place and at the right pace. This “partnership” is an experiment for BCA, and we will gauge how worthwhile it is based on how many of BCA’s supporters show up. It will be important for our members to attend and voice their opinions on the various solutions to the problems posed by fossil fuels, and to advance the conversation toward more environmentally friendly alternatives. We support a shift toward clean, renewable energy sources that don’t contribute to the growing problem of global warming, and it’s critically important that renewable energy is done right, and not in a way that causes future environmental problems. We have provided the energy issues summary below, which compares the advantages and disadvantages of the major alternative energy sources, to be an information source as you develop your talking points. Please attend and take this opportunity to speak up! Join ConocoPhillips and partners, and the University of Wyoming for a Town Hall Meeting, moderated by Dr. Thomas Buchanan, president, University of Wyoming. In addition to speakers from ConocoPhillips, invited panelists include Rob Hurless, Energy and Telecommunications Policy Advisor, Office of Governor Dave Freudenthal, Ken Hamilton, Wyoming Farm Bureau, and Andrea Quiroz, State Director of the Nature Conservancy in Wyoming. Wednesday, June 13, 2007
America’s Energy’s Future Oil, Gas, and Coalbed Methane – These fossil fuels presently present by far the biggest environmental problem currently facing Wyoming. The combustion of all of these fuels (including natural gas) accelerate global warming, and the on-the ground impacts of oil and gas development, currently an essentially unregulated free-for-all in Wyoming. The result has been the loss of wildlife in areas where development encroaches on key habitats, heavy habitat fragmentation due to development patterns that are too dense, with too many roads and wellpads, and the degradation of special landscapes like the Jack Morrow Hills, Adobe Town, and Wyoming Range. In addition, coalbed methane production produces additional environmental problems, most notably the need to dispose of millions of gallons of wastewater laced with heavy metals and salts that must be pumped out of the coal seam before the methane can be extracted. Even if we see a heavy increase in wind and other renewables, and they reach 20% of our nation’s energy consumption, the remaining 80% will likely come from fossil fuels, which means Wyoming will be seeing heavy drilling pressure in coming years regardless of the increase in renewables. It therefore is imperative that oil and gas development be managed in a responsible way, with sound stewardship for the land. This means:
Coal – At present, coal is one of the two biggest culprits implicated in global climate change. There is no such thing as “clean coal,” but there are a number of unproven technologies that hold promise. Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (“IGCC”) methods are an experimental technique to convert coal to a gas fuel before burning it, and offers the possibility of “carbon sequestration,” or trapping carbon dioxide and then pumping it underground so it doesn't contribute to global warming. It is unclear at this point whether CO2 that is sequestered underground will stay underground, and it is also unclear if there is enough underground storage capacity to accept the CO2 from large-scale coal-fired power generation. Finally, coal extraction of ten involves extremely destructive practices like strip mining (in Wyoming) and mountaintop removal (in West Virginia). Oil shale - Oil shale is perhaps the dirtiest and most destructive of all energy sources. Western Colorado, northeastern Utah, and southwestern Wyoming (including large stretches of the southern Red Desert) are underlain by oil shale deposits. Oil shale is extracted from the ground either by strip mining or by an in situ process of high-intensity drilling with underground heating coils, coolant systems, and production wells that turns the entire area to be produced into one giant wellpad. Mined oil shale must then be "retorted," or cooked, to produce the kerogen which can then be converted into oil. Either process requires huge amounts of electricity, and experts project that a medium-sized oil shale operation would also require a coal-fired power plant to supply it. The air pollution associated with oil shale production is enormous, with even more air pollution and greenhouse gases produced when the shale oil is burned. Huge quantities of water are used in oil shale production, and where that water will come from in the arid western states where the shale is found is an open question. It is likely that oil shale is so economically marginal, energy and water intensive, and high-polluting that it will never reach fruition as a significant energy source. Wind – Wind power is just getting started as a major energy resource. If it were to replace oil and gas as an energy source, it would help to alleviate global warming, but the impacts to the land could be as great or greater than current oil and gas drilling. Just like oil and gas, it is critically important to “do it right” with wind, siting facilities away from special places and sensitive wildlife habitats. Sage grouse in particular will abandon their key habitats when tall structures are built nearby. Wind turbines are still killing birds (although they’re getting better using slower-moving blades) and should thus avoid flyways for siting, and they can have major impacts on bat populations. Small-scale (i.e., small units for individual buildings) have little impact. Solar – Solar energy technology continues to make strides, and now the technology is well-suited for application in Wyoming at the scale of individual buildings. Large-scale arrays planned for the California deserts can stretch over hundreds of thousands of acres, and thus have many of the same problems as strip mining and oil and gas development in terms of destroying the land. There are some concerns that chemicals produced during the making of photovoltaic cells can become problematic pollutants. Nuclear – Nuclear fission is heavy used in Europe. The US-style plants result in spent fuel rods that have a radioactive half-life of 12,000 years, and thus present an intractable nightmare in terms of disposal. The Europeans reprocess their fuel rods, but this produces plutonium as a byproduct, which could be seized by terrorists and used to make nuclear weapons. Uranium mining can involve strip mines with great health hazards for neighboring people and wildlife, there is also an in-situ leaching process which can be used with much more limited environmental consequences. Cold fusion remains an elusive goal; hot fusion reactors may provide a cleaner alternative to fission but are unproven at a commercial scale. Hydropower – The construction of dams to create electricity is certainly clean, but often destroys the fish faunas of rivers and floods rich wildlife habitats typically found in bottomlands. Dams have resulted in the demise of many salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest and contributed to the Endangered Species listing of four fishes in the Colorado River – Green River system. Biofuels – These sources of energy have more use in pork-barrel politics than they do for large-scale energy production. Single-crop monoculture farming creates biological deserts that are worse than gas fields in terms of wildlife habitat. It is debatable whether the energy outputs of biofuels (particularly farm-based ethanol) exceed the energy put into their production. Switchgrass has been trumpeted as a potential fuel; this could convert some of our best remaining native prairies to agricultural production, a disaster for grassland plants and wildlife. The use of trees and brush as biofuels could lead to the spread of clearcut-style logging into habitats like pinon-juniper and Gambel oak woodlands that are presently healthy, threatening the health of these ecosystems. All biofuels are carbon-based and therefore exacerbate global warming. So what, then, is the solution? It is clear that we will need to wean our culture away from its addiction to fossil fuels. It is reasonable to expect that the United States will run out of domestic oil supplies within the next few decades, even if national parks were opened up to drilling. Natural gas supplies will be close behind in dwindling to zero. A sustainable energy future will likely include a variety of different alternative energy sources. Additional research and development is needed to develop new sources of energy and to improve the efficiency and ecological sustainability of the ones we have. Efficiency provides one of the greatest potential sources of energy per dollar spent, and over the short term improvements in efficiency has the potential to far outstrip the contributions of emerging renewable energy sources. Rendering buildings, towns, and cities self-sufficient using today’s renewable technologies and green building methods could eliminate the need for coal-fired power plants and also the currently planned expansion of overhead power lines. Above all, we must learn from the mistakes of oil and gas development across the West, and ensure that these mistakes are not repeated with renewable or other future energy projects.
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Biodiversity Conservation Alliance P.O. Box 1512, Laramie, WY 82073 (307) 742-7978 - carmi@voiceforthewild.org |
